Archives: Affiliates

Angela Bruns is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at Gonzaga University. Her research focuses on how families’ interactions with two social institutions—mass incarceration and the low-wage labor market—impact their health and economic well-being. She teaches courses on gender, family, mass incarceration, and social statistics.

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University in 2019 and my J.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014.

My scholarship examines how systems of law and agents of the state create and enforce various modes of state violence. In one thread of this research, I examine how the legal construction of tribal sovereignty has changed over time in U.S. courts, and the implications of this change for the social, political, and legal status of Native children and families.

In the second, I study police and policing at the intersection of race, class, and labor law. Here I examine police as workers in relationship to 1) police unions and their contracts, city councils, citizen review boards, and body-worn cameras, alongside 2) local community activism against police misconduct that reimagines the future of policing using a variety of employment mechanisms. In combination, my research exposes local conditions that attempt to 1) increase the likelihood that officers will not be held accountable for their actions, and 2) silence community voices speaking out against injustice.

My new research draws from my theoretical contributions in both areas and addresses the intersection of sovereignty, policing, and inequality for American Indians. In this developing work, I show that the extractive and exploitative nature of settler colonialism has enduring impacts on the likelihood of Native exposure to state violence today.

My research can be found in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, the Nevada Law Journal, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance. Additionally, my work has been recognized with generous funding from the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Jelanie Ince is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Washington. Jelani’s primary work uses qualitative methods to examine how and why racial inequality persists in the United States.

Another area of Jelani’s research focuses on how digital communities and social movement behavior shape public opinion and influence the political process. Specifically, examining the Movement for Black Lives: the various tactics that actors use to disseminate information about movement activity and deploy frames for recruitment, inclusion, and resistance.

Some of Jelani’s previous work has been featured in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Sociology Compass. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University.

Hilary Bethancourt is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Hilary is passionate about working toward comprehensive and integrative approaches to addressing the social inequities and modifiable diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors that negatively impact physiological, mental, and emotional well-being. She appreciates learning about the sources of biological, social, cultural, and ecological diversity that help shape each individual’s uniqueness and contribute to variable responses to a given diet, lifestyle, or stressor. She is always in pursuit of research projects that can help call attention to the need for public health and nutrition intervention programs that are adequately tailored to individuals’ and communities’ distinct needs, circumstances, and experiences. Currently Hilary is engaged in research focused on quantifying water insecurity experiences among individuals in low- and middle-income settings; identifying who is most in need of safe and reliable water access; and examining how water security relates to food security, physical health, and mental well-being.

Caislin Firth, PhD, MPH is a Research Scientist at the Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute (ADAI) at the University of Washington (UW).

Caislin is a social epidemiologist interested in unpacking how public policies shape social and built environments and their influence on health inequities. This pursuit requires interdisciplinary research methods that prioritize community engagement and intersectoral collaborations, given that the mechanisms of change (policy, zoning, infrastructure) often lie outside the purview of public health and academia. With a background working in local government in the Pacific Northwest, Caislin’s research goes beyond answering the questions “do population health interventions (e.g. cannabis legalization) improve health?” by also considering what works, for whom, and in which contexts. In practice, Caislin has studied the underlying causes of inequities in substance use, criminal justice, mobility, and transportation outcomes and the relationships between neighborhood environments and health.

Caislin leads a research program that uses community science to design equitable healthy cities and mitigate negative health effects of gentrification (GENUINE, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research). Caislin’s research spans criminal justice, cannabis, healthy city, and population health intervention research with a predisposition towards spatial epidemiology, multi-level modeling, and applying novel epidemiologic methods to research projects.

Caislin is a Horowitz Foundation Social Policy Fellow and received a PhD in Epidemiology from the UW where her dissertation focused on the impacts of adult cannabis legalization on socio-spatial health inequities for youth. Caislin is a consulting editor for Cannabis.

Monica Keith is a biological anthropologist, data scientist, and director of the Anthropological Health & Data Science (AHDS) Lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. She researches health disparities and human variation in a biosocial framework that integrates health, socioecological, and genetic data. Her scholarship is focused on addressing disparities in maternal and reproductive health, child growth and nutrition, disease risk, and cardiometabolic health across the life course. She collaborates on several longitudinal field studies with subsistence-based and Indigenous communities in Dominica, Bangladesh, and Argentina. Her focus on reproductive health also extends to the US, where she works with data from the NIH National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to address racialized disparities in pregnancy and birth outcomes. Another emerging area of her scholarship examines the impacts of climate change and environmental exposures, such as extreme heat and flooding, on human physiology, behavior, and health outcomes.

Leo S. Morales, MD, PhD, is a Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Health Services. He serves as Chief Diversity Officer for the School of Medicine. He also serves as director of the Center for Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Medicine and co-director of the Latino Center for Health in the School of Public Health. Prior to joining UW, he held faculty appoints at UCSF, UCLA and the Group Health Research Institute. Dr. Morales’s research has focused on measurement of patient reported outcomes in diverse populations, and minority health and health disparities including immigrant and Latino Health. Dr. Morales received his medical degree from the University of Washington and completed a residency in primary care internal medicine at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital. He completed a research fellowship in primary care at UCLA and received his Ph.D. in Policy Studies from the RAND Graduate School. He also received an M.P.H. in Health Services from the University of Washington.

Yuan Hsiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. His major research explores the intersection of communication processes, social media, and social networks. He is particularly interested in bringing a social network perspective to understanding a variety of communication and social processes, such as how community networks affect health behavior, how networks on social media contribute to protest mobilization, how social interactions shape the production of health and political misinformation, or how spatial and social relationships affect the spread of religion. He then combines multiple sources of data, such as “big” digital data, survey experiments, or historical archives, to glean insight into general theoretical processes. His work spans the disciplines of communication, sociology, public health, and he is deeply interested in inter-disciplinary dialogues.

LaTonya J. Trotter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at University of Washington. Dr. Trotter joined the department of Bioethics and Humanities in August 2021. She is a sociologist of medicine whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace. As a sociologist, she takes an institutional view of ethics by considering how social and workplace institutions shape notions of responsibility and what constitutes “good” or ethical decisions by both health care professionals and lay providers of care.  Her book More than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve For Patients, Health Care Organizations and the State (Cornell University Press, 2020), investigates these questions through the empirical case of nurse practitioners working on interdisciplinary teams within long-term care.

E. Roberto Orellana joined University of Washington’s School of Social Work as a professor in 2021. Before joining UW, he was professor and associate dean for research and sponsored projects in the School of Social Work at Portland State University (PSU) where he also served as an affiliate faculty in Public Health and Indigenous Nations Studies. He has held visiting research scientist appointments at Columbia University’s Social Intervention Group, UCSD’s Department of Global Public Health, and collaborating faculty at Harvard University School of Public Health.

Internationally, Orellana has worked with several indigenous organizations, is a member of the board of directors of a research and education nonprofit organization in Guatemala, and has served on the research advisory council of the International Indigenous Working Group on HIV/AIDS. These international institutions are dedicated to HIV prevention and health promotion among indigenous populations worldwide.

Orellana is currently involved in some of the most challenging public-health issues of the day including developing culturally tailored training for Latinx social workers who are providing COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccine promotion among Latinx communities in the Pacific Northwest; a national HIV behavioral surveillance project focused on high-risk populations; and an international indigenous health research training program serving Peru, Guatemala, Nepal and Hawaii.

Orellana received a BA in psychology in 2002, MSW in 2004, and MPH in 2005, all from the University of Washington. In 2009, he earned a doctoral degree in social work from Columbia University and a master’s degree in philosophy from that same institution.

His post-doctoral training included a global health delivery program at Harvard School of Public Health, research fellowships with the UW School of Social Work’s Indigenous Wellness Research Institute and the HIV Intervention Science Training Program at Columbia University. He also received advanced intervention science training from the NIH Office of AIDS Research.

A prolific author and sought-after conference presenter/panelist, Orellana has contributed numerous articles to scientific and research publications and has made keynote or other significant presentations at conferences in Mexico City; Durban, South Africa; Washington, D.C.; Calgary, Alberta; New Orleans; San Francisco; and Pucallpa, Peru, among other places.

Orellana is a member of many professional organizations, including the Society for Prevention Research, Society for Social Work and Research, International AIDS Society, American Public Health Association, Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for the Advancement of Chicano/Hispanic and Native Americans in Science.